The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 20 Feb.

Granny's packin'.
It's the end of the world as we know it...

• Alica Colon, writing in the New York Sun, says it is absolutely amazing how America can continue to produce military heroes while electing cowardly politicians who mock their sacrifices.
  
  

  The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133.
  
  This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens. Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites.
  
  What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration:
  
  1,245 in 1993;
  1,109 in 1994;
  1,055 in 1995;
  1,008 in 1996.
  
  That's 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who's counting?

  Read the DoD source of Colon's numbers here. Read the rest of Colon's story here.

• In the wake of the U.S. House of Representatives passing a resolution that amounts to a vote of no confidence in the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, a new national survey by Alexandria, VA-based Public Opinion Strategies and commissioned by the Moriah Group shows the American people may have some different ideas from their elected leaders on this issue.
  
  The survey shows Americans want to win in Iraq, and that they understand Iraq is the central point in the war against terrorism and they can support a U.S. strategy aimed at achieving victory, said Neil Newhouse, a partner in POS. The idea of pulling back from Iraq is not where the majority of Americans are.
  
  The survey also found that voters thought it would hurt American prestige more to pull out of Iraq immediately (59 percent) than it would to stay there for the long term (35 percent). Public Opinion Strategies "scored the best win-loss record among the major polling and media firms in the 2004 election" and was named Pollster of the Year in 2002.
  Read the full survey here (pdf).

• Ready for yet another dose of irony? AP reports, in a victory for President Bush, a divided federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Guantanamo Bay detainees cannot use the U.S. court system to challenge their indefinite imprisonment. A Supreme Court appeal was promised.
  
  The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismisses hundreds of cases filed by foreign-born detainees in federal court.
  
  If you read the above cited AP story, beware of reporter Hope Yen's biased viewpoint and less than objective speculations.

• The Minnesota Daily reports one-time presidential contender Al Gore may get an honorary doctorate for his work in climatology.

• Contrast the Gore global warming love-fest with what some climate scientists are actually saying.
  
  Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of Britain's leading climate scientists recently said:
  
  

  "I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric."
  
  "It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the skeptics. How the wheel turns. . . . Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists, too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror, and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? . . . To state that climate change will be 'catastrophic' hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science."

  Read "Scenes from the Climate Inquisition" from last week's edition of The Weekly Standard.

• And finally, here's a story to excite and titillate any self-respecting 9/11 conspiracy theorist. AP reports a New York man accused of trying to help terrorists in Afghanistan has donated some $15,000 to the House Republicans' campaign committee over three years.

Tags: Decline and Fall of Western Civ, Open Thread, Wire, Headlines, United States
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